


Plan B

by greenjudy



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Bad Coffee, Gen, Post-Dirge of Cerberus, WRO, bad language, statecraft, the Turks - Freeform, violence and the law
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-08
Updated: 2013-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-22 19:09:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/916970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy/pseuds/greenjudy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Look. At that wacktastic party Rufus threw last week, didn’t you see his face?  He’s a vulture, man. He’s just waiting. We need to get smarter. We need to think like Turks.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plan B

 

“I think,” she says, eyes teary and voice wavering the whole time, “violence is stupid.” 

“Right,” I say, and make a checkmark beside her name. 

“So whatever I do, you know, I want to help—“

“Like, coffee and stuff.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I could do that.” 

“Did you, um, notice the body armor? That I’m wearing?” 

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess.” 

I gesture at my Bender, parked near my feet, safety on but muzzle up, leaning against the desk. “Listen, okay? Any internships around here right now? Are gonna require that you can field-strip this into the bullpup configuration.”

This more or less brings the interview to an end. 

 

\--

Reeve looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. I pick up his moogle-shaped coffee mug and look inside. 

It’s too bad; the WRO could use a good coffee person. 

“You’re scaring them away,” he says.

“You want those guys? You want their vomit all over your weird marble floors?” 

“Thank you,” he says, “for that image, Yuffie.” 

“I know we’re against the wall, man. I know. But we need some other caliber of intern, okay? We are not, shit, how’d Rufus put it? ‘Prepared for the unique challenges of the context.’”

“Rufus and the context,” Reeve murmurs, “are virtually synonyms at this point.” He shoves his hair out of his eyes. “That’s why we are executing Plan B. That’s why we need to expand our recruitment. That’s why we need…” 

“Everything?” 

Reeve is silent. 

“When we were fully funded, Deepground creamed us,” I remind him. “They creamed us and put us on toast and ate us for breakfast. And if we go forward with Plan B, we’ll be points down in every department, I mean shortfalls every fucking where.” I sit on the edge of his desk. “We do Plan B, what we need,” I muse, “are Turks.” 

“We don’t need Turks,” Reeve says, his voice flat and distant. 

“We totally need Turks. They’re ops specialists. They’re fucking intel monsters. Plus, they do recruiting like nobody’s business.”

“Do you know,” Reeve says, his face grey, “how they ‘recruited’ their SOLDIER candidates? Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?” 

“I sure do,” I tell him. “Up close and goddamn personal. Reno fucking felt me up, man. When they burned down Don Corneo, on Da Chao. I know they’re weasels, okay?” 

“We’re not going to deploy a press-gang, Yuffie. It’s true, we’re going to need personnel.” He rubs his face; his hair is in his eyes again. “We’ll need personnel; we’ll need ordnance; Lord knows we’ll need funds.” 

“Look. At that wacktastic party Rufus threw last week, didn’t you see his face? He’s a vulture, man. He’s just waiting. We need to get smarter. We need to think like Turks.”

Reeve sits back and looks at me for a long time without saying anything. 

“You’re fucking intransigent,” I tell him.

“Who taught you to talk like that?” he asks softly. 

“My first words,” I say, “were curse words, okay?”

“I don’t mean the swearing. Your political analysis,” he says, getting up from his desk, “is maturing.” 

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means you’re not wrong.” 

\--

“Wow,” I say. “Thought you were, you know, a girl person.” 

“I beg your fucking pardon?” Reno asks, inserting himself into the booth. Tseng’s already out the door, just a flash of upscale winter-weight wool in my peripheral vision.

Edge’s latest effort to import some retro charm into what is basically a thin film of civilization on top of a demilitarized zone has sparkly red vinyl u-shaped booths, jazzy formica tabletops, and what looks like Cloud’s old motorcycle suspended precariously from the ceiling. Business appears to be booming.

“You two,” I say, “whoa. Are you guys, you know, canoodling?” 

“Canoodling.”

“You and Tseng.”

“Tseng,” Reno says, “not really a canoodler.”

“Could’ve fooled me, back there, just now.”

“My theory,” Reno says, “you are not getting any. Sex is on your mind.” 

“The WRO,” I retort, “surviving until tomorrow morning. That’s what’s on my mind, all right?” 

Reno waves the waitress over, orders a strawberry milkshake, while I stare at him in disbelief. 

“That decaf, honey?” the waitress asks me, brandishing a coffee pot with a green lid.

“Might as well be,” I say, wearily, and she tops me up.

Presently, after Reno wipes away a truly obscene pink milkshake moustache, he stretches out on his side of the booth, starfish-style, pushes his glasses higher up his forehead, and regards me.

“He know you’re here?”

That would be Reeve.

“Nope.”

Reno lifts one eyebrow and smiles that same smarmy smile he gave me all those years ago when he peeled me off the side of the mountain. But instead of unleashing whatever witticism he had planned, he pauses for a second and takes another gulp of his shake.

“Reeve,” he says, “is trying to do things in a non-Shinra way.” 

“No shit,” I say.

“Coming to me,” Reno says, “kind of fucks that whole template up.” 

“Maybe. Maybe not.” 

Reno cracks his neck and slurps his shake.

“Maybe,” he says, “you should let your boss be the boss.” 

“Tseng ties you up,” I hazard, “and you like it. Look like an alley cat, turns out you’re a running dog? What the fuck, Reno?”

“Whatever, stage a coup, then,” Reno says, sounding bored. “Be the boss and find out what kind of shit storm he has to contend with for yourself. You want my advice, HR Lady? Don’t sneak behind Reeve’s back to do shit.”

“Because,” I say, “Tseng has always been so fucking great that way? Because Tseng was such an awesome follower of the rules back then and right now, right? Does Rufus know, by the way, about how Tseng got that opera singer back into Wutai out from under his goddamn nose? Big, valuable hostage, because that’s what she was, face it, suddenly shows up back in Godou’s living room? Rufus know about how that worked?” Direct hit: Reno finishes his milkshake. 

“Conversation’s over,” he says. “You get the bill, I’m out of here.”

“Wait,” I yelp. 

Reno’s half-in, half-out of his long leather duster, a disgusted expression on his face. 

“Look, Reno, Reeve agrees with me, okay? He said so, sort of. But he can’t do anything about it. He knows, but he can’t _know._ I mean, structurally, he cannot know this. That’s why I’m here, all right? Because Reeve cannot possibly fucking come himself.”

Reno, still standing beside the booth, looks at me like he’s never seen me before. 

“Fuck’s sake, Reno, I know you understand,” I say, as he slowly eases the coat off his arms and slides back into his seat. 

He’s not just older than the last time I saw him. He _looks_ older. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the lines around his mouth reminded me of Reeve, not a comparison I thought I’d ever find myself making. 

“You know what? I have kind of a bad feeling about what Rufus thought he was doing when he got us started. No, don’t, okay?” I wave my hand at him before he can say anything. “Of course I know about that. It’s what my dad likes to call an open secret.”

I try my coffee again. It’s cold, which is fine, because it sucks.

“The WRO has a real, legit peacekeeping mission on this stupid planet,” I say. “We’re not trying to invade anyone. We’re not interested in resource monopoly. We are trying to protect helpless dudes from getting eaten alive by the forces of fucking history. And we are staring at a very serious funding problem called ‘we need to get the fuck out from under Rufus before he turns us into a Shinra subsidiary.’ We have to do something and we have to do it right now.”

Reno, who’s regained his grip on his temper, orders another milkshake. 

“Why on earth,” he asks finally, “you bringing this to my attention? What makes you think this isn’t going right in his ear?” 

“Because we need your help,” I say simply. As he makes an indelicate noise, I add: “And because I know something weird is going on with the Turks, okay?”

Reno barks a laugh.

“You’re dreaming, little girl.”

“There is an opera singer back with her family right now who suggests that you are full of shit,” I say. 

 

\--

I’m so fucking sick of being a geopolitical person.

I feel like I’ve been crawling around on gigantic carpet-maps of the world since I was born. Godou, who was only selectively aware that I was a girl, pushed my nose into it at every opportunity, so that I was never just an individual doing individual things. I couldn’t even kick someone’s ass without it getting refracted back to me through the lens of global current events: the problem solving I thought I was learning in the dojo was just not scalable. 

You can throw an attacker. You can’t throw fucking poverty or a lethal pandemic. You can’t even solve the problem of insurgency by throwing insurgents around; they just come back stronger, and then violence itself kind of gets in the water, and it never goes away. 

Fucking state failure: fucking Shinra, that never was a state in the first place, never was anything but a plunder machine. 

And that is the sad, pitiful part: despite all my attempts to act like a free agent, all the ways I recoiled from my stupid fate, I _am_ a geopolitical person, and I _do_ want a scalable solution, and I _am_ painfully aware of the nature of my weapons and all the ways they come back on me, over and over again. 

That, I guess, is what made Reeve sort of interesting. It seemed like maybe he had worked out a way to scale his own particular style of problem solving – an architectural answer to the nightmare of history. But Reeve learned a lesson from Midgar: he doesn’t just build cities anymore. He doesn’t build physical structures and hope for the best. This time the architecture is soft, stuff like treaties, legal frameworks, agreements – and they are so fucking fragile in the end. 

To protect this stuff, we need Benders; we need tanks; we need guys, all true. But more than that, we need Turks. Soft architecture needs subtle operators. 

Sitting in the booth with Cloud’s motorcycle hanging over my head, I finish Reno’s abandoned milkshake and try to figure out what the hell Tseng is doing.

 

\--

When the email told me to go to the Pavilion, it sounded like a place for a picnic, so I packed accordingly. Imagine my surprise when I plug the coordinates into my GPS and find myself at an out-of-the-way building site my guys have been watching for Reeve, where something shaped like a double helix backed up against the entrance to the Mythril Mines has been going up, floor by floor, over the last twelve weeks. 

At the gate, I take the security fellas aside and show them my phone displaying the barcode that had come as an attachment to the email. I am promptly issued a hard hat and a nametag that reads “Code Enforcement Officer Patsy Heelface, Wutai Branch.” 

Very funny, Rude. Good thing I brought a clipboard from work. 

I locate him sixty floors up and thirty feet out into plain thin air, sitting in a deck chair on a little triangular steel plate at the ass-end of a girder. He’s propped his feet on a toolbox and is making notes with a stylus on his phone. I sit down cross-legged on the girder in front of him, put my backpack in my lap, and fold my arms on top of it. 

“I half-expected to see you walking with a limp, after that Moag landed on you,” Rude says by way of greeting, alluding to our last encounter, seven months back: a skirmish with some very strange dudes in a mountain compound outside Nibelheim, guys who’d been surviving on leaves and berries or something but had some seriously fine hardware to wave around. With the Turk assist, we’d put the insurgency down, but not before things got kind of gnarly. I’d been pinned under a Moag transport. It wasn’t fun. 

“It plays up,” I say, inexplicably driven, as I often am around Rude, to demonstrate my street cred, “from time to time. I wore a very awesome knee brace for a while. But it’s cool. Fucking knees, man.”

“Do not get me started,” Rude says, “on knees.”

“Sandwich?” 

“Sure, great,” Rude says.

I pair the sandwich in its paper wrapping with a bag of potato chips and set them down in front of Rude. I extract two bottles of root beer, still cold, from my backpack; I have it on authority, never mind whose, that Rude is fond of root beer. 

The wind picks up, tugs at Rude’s shirt. I watch birds blown sideways past the girder. 

“How do you like the view?” Rude asks. 

“Very fucking grim,” I say, “lot of creepy gigantic swamp snakes, not a lot of photo opportunities.” 

“Maybe you’re looking at the wrong thing. Look again.” 

I survey the desolate landscape. 

“Yep, still there. I’ve seen this swamp before.” 

“Not this way,” Rude says. “Not from up here.” 

I’m starting to feel played with; it might have something to do with the name on my tag. 

“Look,” I say, “this is all super entertaining; I always wanted to have a picnic on structural steel up in fucking outer space. Can we proceed now? You obviously talked to Reno; you know the situation. You hauled me all the way out here. I brought you a roast beef sandwich, damn it. You got something for me, or what?”

“Got something?” Rude chews, scratches his neck, and hoists his root beer. “Just felt like reminiscing, I guess.” 

“Reminiscing?” Fatigue is finally catching up with me, and I’m suddenly annoyed. “What a-fucking-bout, Rude?” 

“Old times,” he says. 

“Old times.”

“Yeah, old times. Like seven months ago.” 

I feel my eyebrows go all the way up.

“You know,” I say carefully, “I’ve always wondered how those guys got their gear.” 

“And what their actual purpose was?”

“Um, insurgency?” 

Rude puts down his sandwich and makes a wheeling movement with his hands that I translate as, “Come on, kid. Get from Point A to Point B.” 

I stare at Rude, gobsmacked. 

“Really? Fucking really? A false flag operation? Wreck the joint, then come in and offer protection?”

“Just make sure you don’t have too many of the same faces in the two teams,” Rude says. “Are you following okay? You see the view now?”

“We have to address this,” I say, “this is fucking urgent. We have to get on top of this. That kind of violence will wreck our ability to make coalitions. Public opinion will start screaming for…How many of these groups are in his pocket?”

Rude looks down at his hands, spreads them out on his knees. Oh, I think. 

“Rufus,” I tell Rude, “is a fascist.”

“Yeah, Reno told me you figured that out.”

“The WRO is not supposed to be a state power. It’s not about bringing the world to order, okay? Reeve’s trying to build infrastructure to support the infrastructure. He’s not laying down roads so Shinra tanks can roll down them. We’re trying to make sure they have a fighting chance to exist, okay? Nations. Actual states. A polity, know what I mean? Not just one guy and one idea.”

Out of nowhere, Rude is deadly serious. 

“You can’t create a polity, you can’t establish that stuff and make it stick, without invoking the authority of law. What kind of ground is that law standing on?”

“The ground of agreement,” I say. 

Rude takes off his glasses and looks at me for a long time.

“How do you plan to get people to agree?” 

What Rude doesn’t say just hangs there, horrible: I know. 

This is the problem, the problem the insurgents are putting right in my face: I know how you normally get to the ground of agreement. It’s marked out, set up; we draw a line, and we do it with violence. 

 

\--

“Loan me Rude,” I say.

Tseng lifts a plate from the stream and cocks his right eyebrow.

“Loan you Rude?”

“I need a Turk,” I say. “I need someone who knows what’s going on.”

I know how I sound: desperate.

Tseng contemplates his hamachi nigiri. 

“Rude,” he says finally, “isn’t mine to loan out.” 

“Is it good?” I ask.

“Help yourself,” he says, pushing the plate across. 

New Junon is a pretty interesting place these days. Sushi boat operations are a relatively new development here. This one, Sushi Super Treat, has gone to the trouble to build a fiberglass replica of Da Chao in the waiting area, with an apocryphal waterfall that spills down its side. This resolves into a shallow stream that flows in a wide ring around the sushi chefs and their knives. The little boats that carry the sushi around and around are decorated with all the gods of Wutai. I liked the symbolism of this, and thought Tseng might appreciate the note of menace it supplied, hinting at unspoken intel about his activities. 

I can’t expense account my lunch with Tseng since it’s a gigantic fucking secret I am keeping from my boss. Moreover, I’ll have to pay his way, since I asked him. As a result I have personally tried to stick to the el cheapo stuff, the plain plates; but I am also very hungry. My stack is about twice as tall as Tseng’s, nullifying my price gambit.

I stare at the little gold-edged plate. The hamachi nigiri is gorgeous. 

“You should eat it,” Tseng says, lifting a plate full of tuna sashimi out of the stream. “It’s not bad at all.” 

He’s right. It’s fucking fantastic.

“How about Elena? Did she get back yet? I heard she’s been doing something weird with materia out behind Rocket Town. She was always talented at getting fairly lethal variations off the mastered materia—and now that mako’s getting kind of unpredictable—“ 

“Miss Kisaragi,” Tseng says, “I would be interested to know who told you that.”

“No idea,” I say, “it was re-tweeted like a million times.” 

To my surprise, Tseng cracks a smile. 

“I don’t, strictly speaking, command the Turks anymore,” he explains. 

“Sure,” I say.

“There are, strictly speaking, no Turks at present.” 

“Uh-huh,” I say. “That explains why you’re not wearing a tie.” 

“The individuals formerly known as Turks are perhaps best understood as special envoys,” Tseng continues, “answering directly to Rufus, in a quasi-official capacity.” 

“Look, Tseng, you can call them goodwill ambassadors, I really don’t care. They are so painfully obviously still Turks, and so are you, even if you’re not exactly completely, shall we say, team players anymore.” 

Tseng chooses not to reply to this. 

“I’ll even take Reno,” I say.

“I was always under the impression,” Tseng says, “that Reno was a particular favorite of yours.”

I really, one hundred percent, cannot tell whether he actually thinks he’s seeing into my secret heart or is just making fun of me.

“I don’t like to do this,” I say, giving up and snagging a punishingly expensive hexagonal plate loaded with sea urchin nigiri. “I hate blackmail. But fuck it, okay? I know you guys are cooking something and I know that Rufus doesn’t know what you’re cooking. So do you want to help me, or do you want to explain to Rufus about your network?”

Tseng is utterly impossible to read. He’s just reaching into the stream for a completely non-Wutainese piece of kalakand milk cake.

“I thought you were lactose intolerant,” I say, partly to demonstrate the depths of my intel, partly just to be mean.

“This is for you,” he says, laying a fancy long-tined fork beside the plate. 

“That’s a nice gesture, except for the part where I’m buying,” I say. 

“You get my point?” he asks.

“Nope.”

“Are you quite sure,” Tseng says, “I haven’t decided it’s time for Rufus to learn about that? Are you completely sure you’re not a convenient vehicle for that information?”

I stare at him.

He smiles.

“You may also wish to consider,” he continues, selecting a bright orange tapioca drink out of the stream, “the position in which you might be leaving Godou, were you to make good on your threat.” 

He takes a frighteningly large straw and inserts it through the lid of his drink. I am completely thrown by the spectacle of the ex-director of the Turks, post-sushi, scarfing tapioca like some kind of manga-reading, gangtai-listening high school kid. In the battle of manipulated expectations, Tseng has just handed me my ass.

I jam a forkful of cake into my mouth: I’m not going to say another word. I can’t, apparently, be trusted. 

“You need,” Tseng says gently, “more practice with that particular weapon.”

I hate Tseng. I hate him even more than I hate Godou.

 

\--

Kalm has changed.

Some of the survivors are doing okay, but there’s an ache here, something that didn’t go away with reconstruction, didn’t get worked out when the Deepground leftovers were brought in and arraigned and tried. Something about the town is off, like a broken leg that healed wrong; how you walk will never be the same.

Penalty Bar, like so many of our places, is new; it occupies a warehouse-like space that I’m pretty sure once wholesaled farm equipment. As I saunter towards the door under the very last of the daylight I can feel the bass end of whatever’s playing in there in my feet. The windows, blacked out with paint, are vibrating.

Inside, disco lights strobe and flicker; it’s a little hard to track the action. I hear the crunch of glass, layered on top of a techno backbeat so loud that it sounds like a helicopter is trying to land at the bar. Then a bottle comes out of the shiny darkness and breaks next to my left ear. I take the prudent course and get on the floor.

There are a lot of arms and legs in motion, a lot of martial arts, and a lot of yelling—but it’s not a free-for-all: the Penalty Bar regulars all seem to be ganging up on the same person, or at least converging on the same obscure point of origin. I can’t figure out who or what they are aiming at; at first I think it’s a ghost, or someone with a nifty hide-your-ass spell. 

Then I remember how short she is. 

I finally spot her when she picks up a table and chucks it at a guy twice her size and wearing too many earrings. Beer bottles arc through the air and shatter on Penalty Bar’s concrete floor. I watch her duck under a fist and put a boot in another big guy’s kidney. One of the skinny ones comes in speedy and loses his footing, skating on broken glass and beer. She hooks his collar and throws him into three of his friends. Then someone hits her with a chair; when she gets up, she’s got chair legs in both her hands and she’s moving so fast the guy who hit her doesn’t have time to make a sound. 

I look for the bouncer and find him crouched behind the bar. 

“Yeah,” I agree, joining him. “Probably just let her finish, huh.”

There are a few loud cracks. The noise that’s been making my fillings ache is abruptly silenced, and after a second, Clem Handy starts to sing “Lonely Chocobo Rider.” I peek over the bar. 

Elena, hands deep in the pockets of her olive green bomber jacket, is moving slowly away from the jukebox. She’s got a shiner on her eye and a goose-egg on her forehead, presumably from the chair, but she’s walking in a straight line, and as she gets closer, I can hear her humming under her breath.

She’s been hard to track down. It took half-a-dozen texts before she sent me a place and time; I hadn’t figured on the bar fight, but maybe that’s what she does when she’s off the clock. 

“I love Clem Handy,” Elena says when she reaches me. “Big sky music. Real feelings. You know?” 

Not certain how to reply to this, I say, finally, “My dad likes him.”

“Clem’s a Kalm guy,” Elena says, “raised by chocobo people, the real deal.” 

“The, um, _other_ Kalm guys don’t seem like he’s really their cup of tea.”

“They’ll grow into it,” she says.

A large pitcher of beer has appeared next to her. Beer is not my thing, but I accept a glass, to be polite. Elena picks up the pitcher, drinks half of it, wipes her mouth on her sleeve, and looks at me.

“Something you don’t understand about us, Reno especially,” Elena says, “it’s loyalty.” 

“Loyalty to Rufus?”

“To Tseng. To _Tseng._ Don’t you have eyes?”

“Tseng, of all people,” I say.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that Tseng doesn’t strike me as particularly loyal himself.”

“Tseng,” Elena says shortly, “is loyal to principles.”

I think that over. Elena, who apparently reads minds, snorts. 

“Of course Tseng operates according to principles. You think he doesn’t see what Rufus is trying to do? Why do you think I’m having this conversation with you? Do you think I’d be here if he said no? Isn’t it obvious he’s trying to help you? Are you an idiot?”

“He calls this helping?”

“You’re trying to jump too many squares, all right? You can’t move like that. You don’t have enough leverage yet.”

“I don’t care. We’re out of time. We need to make our own leverage.” 

The music’s stopped. I notice a kid in plaid-and-safety-pins, standing at Elena’s elbow. 

“More Clem Handy, ma’am?” he asks. “We noticed that song was over. Would you like to make another selection?”

I give Elena fifteen gil for the jukebox. “I want to hear the Love Monsters,” I tell her.

“Rufus is playing a very long fucking game,” I say, when she comes back. “I’ve seen what he’s willing to do. I don’t buy his atonement program, and I don’t want to be the face for his global hegemony.” 

Elena slowly and deliberately finishes the pitcher. Based on her body mass, I figure she must be a little spun, but her eyes, when she looks at me, are cold and clear. 

“I can’t figure out why Tseng even bothers,” she says. “Use your head. The guys from before.”

“You mean the ones who tried to square dance on your face? What about them?”

“Are you thinking about them at all?”

“What…what are you talking about?”

“Have you never asked a question in your life? What is Rufus doing with all these little groups? What atmosphere is he trying to create? Why is Rufus trying to poison public opinion? Who is closest to declaring full operational independence? Who is arming, for real, right now? Ask your father.” 

“Wutai,” I say.

“If Wutai rises now,” Elena says, “there’ll be a war. You want a war?” 

 

\--

Of course I don’t want a war. 

The point, though, is that some things might conceivably be worse: a world without war might conceivably be worse.

A world at peace, a world in order…

A world in order is a world that follows orders. And we know whose.

 

\--

When I get back, hungry and cranky after several hours trapped behind a very important and very slow medical supplies convoy headed for HQ on the Kalm highway, Vincent Valentine is standing in my kitchenette. 

He’s looking out the little porthole-like window next to the refrigerator, tapping his armored claw-fingers on the counter. The microwave is on. 

“Can I understand what you’re doing here?” I ask him. “I mean, is it something I’m going to be able to understand?”

The microwave pings.

“Food first. Then we talk,” Valentine says.

“What…what did you make?”

He pops the door of the microwave and pulls out a plate.

“You made a quesadilla,” I say.

It is true that in recent months, Vincent has unbent a little. Just last week I saw him in Edge, sitting there in broad daylight at the Lost Sheep Café, coffee and croissant beside him, with a book propped open on his knee. At the time I took this as a sign that he had decided to become a human being. 

I’m not sure what to make of the quesadilla, which is not bad, all things considered.

We sit across from one another at my little pull-down dinner table. Night’s fallen. We’re working on a passable bottle of cabernet, poured into paper cups. Vincent has his cape in his lap and is using a needle and black thread to reattach one of the metal strap clamps with astonishingly small and even stitches.

“Why, then,” I say, wiping cheese off my face with a paper towel. 

“Because statecraft on an empty stomach is a bad idea,” he says.

“Who told you?”

“Tseng,” Vincent says. 

“I can’t figure out how you grated all that cheese with your gauntlet,” I say. He shrugs, holds up the needle with his claws. “Point taken,” I say, “no pun intended.” 

“The WRO,” he says, “is about to experience significant technical difficulties.”

“I figure it’s already begun. I have no idea how Reeve swung the supplies. Wrote Mideel Health Works an IOU, I guess. Rufus know about Plan B?”

“He knows.”

I put more wine in my cup. I think of Reeve, who probably didn’t choose this timetable. 

“Is it my fault? Did Reno rat me out?”

“Reeve sent a memo to Rufus. While you were in Kalm.”

“That bastard! He didn’t wait for me…?”

“Did you wait for him?”

My stomach turns over. “He knew about all of it, didn’t he?”

“Reeve,” Vincent says, “is not exactly a fool.” 

“Fuck’s sake,” I say. “Reno was right all along…I should have waited. I should have gotten him on board. Now we’re out in front of our own fucking Plan B. We’re wide open. We don’t have any cover. I moved too soon.”

“Death, treachery, fear,” he says quietly. “Reeve knows where the ground is. He’s not building another Midgar, another city in the air, pretending the ground doesn’t exist.”

“I should have protected him,” I say, miserable. “I was trying to protect him. I got it wrong.” 

“You set it in motion. You served the purpose,” he says. “Someone had to.”

“You sound like a Turk.” 

The corner of his mouth turns up. 

“Turks,” he says, “execute the orders. Turks aren’t supposed to question, because their job is to enforce something that operates beyond all questioning.”

“There is violence at the heart of the law,” I say, and discover I’ve quoted my father. 

“Yes.”

“We all stand on this terrible ground,” I say, “it doesn’t seem like we can get away from that. Godou’s ancestors poisoned their own relatives on a regular fucking basis. Godou’s power comes from murder. It happened a long time ago, but it happened. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen. The WRO got its seed money from Rufus Shinra.”

Vincent lifts his cup, drinks. 

“Tseng thinks we can make a different kind of law,” he says. “You told Rude the WRO was looking for the ground of agreement. Maybe we can reach agreement by asking questions instead of silencing them.”

“Tseng thinks that?”

“Tseng was a professional,” Vincent says. “He didn’t ask. Then Reno dropped the Plate.”

 

\--

When I finally get up from my chair, the sun’s coming up. I splash water on my face and go to find my boss.

Reeve’s up on the roof, looking east, into the light. The skin is stretched tight over his cheekbones. He looks fierce, bleak, burnt to a crisp. 

“What can I do?” I ask him.

He’s silent for a long time. Then he looks down, closes his eyes, and smiles.

I have never seen that smile before, not on his face. 

“I put Rufus on notice. I want you to rub it in. Do you understand?”

 

\--

“Isn’t this nice?”

I pour out the tea. I’m in full mufti, wearing a dress Godou gave me on one of those occasions when he realized I was a girl. The tea service was salvaged from the wreck of the Shinra Building; the tea in the pot is from Wutai. 

Rufus is leaning on the balcony, gazing at the tops of the wind-ruffled trees as they spread away from Healen Lodge.

“It’s all because of me,” he says. 

“I know.”

“I underwrote your activities. Every clinic, every peacekeeping operation. Without me, the WRO wouldn’t exist.”

“I know,” I say again. Rufus looks distressed. 

“You won’t be able to survive without that funding. The WRO won’t be able to fulfill its mission.”

I find myself admiring him against my will. You could almost get there from here, almost buy the narrative: Rufus, young and brilliant, the old savage Shinra impulses tempered by Meteorfall, by Geostigma; all that ruthless discipline focused on healing the Planet. 

“Knock it off,” I tell him. 

Rufus tilts his head to one side, looking exactly like someone listening intently, respectfully, to a philosophical opponent. I think of the insurgents in the mountains. 

“It’s not actually chess,” I say. “I imagine you see it that way. Why you like to be up high, so you can look down and move the pieces. But the world isn’t two sides, and someone’s game. Maybe it looks that way from the air. But it’s a false dichotomy, man. It’s mind control.”

I put down my cup and join him at the balustrade. The wind is pushing on his pretty white coat. He looks great. No shadow haunts his face now. 

“You can’t have it,” I tell Rufus.

“Can’t have what?”

“The world,” I say. 

“No.” Rufus straightens up, puts the creases back in his pants. “But if I weren’t angling for it, who would be? Godou? Reeve? You, maybe.”

Me?

“We all begin the same way,” Rufus says. “Don’t forget that.”

 

\--

“Well?”

“He encouraged us to re-think,” I tell Reeve. “Told me he’d resume funding, no questions asked, as soon as we said.”

“Did he appreciate your dress?”

“I don’t think he’s into girls. Here.”

I put the tray on his desk. 

“Coffee and cookies,” he says, surprised. “Don’t tell me Vincent’s baking.”

“New recruit,” I tell him. “He doesn’t know from Benders. He does, however, bake a mean cookie. Also,” I say, as Reeve samples one, “he has like thirty uncles. Thirty unhappy uncles who have been organizing in the woods near Gongaga.”

Reeve mulls this over, sips his coffee. 

“This is fantastic. Can we afford this?” 

“For about two more weeks.”

“We’re fucked,” he says quietly. “Rufus can afford to be conciliatory; he knows we’re toothless without his money. We’re through.”

“So is Gongaga, if we don’t do something.”

“How can we help them? What can we give them?”

“Every resource at Rufus’s disposal,” Reno says from the door. “Same as always. Sort of.” 

He drops a flash drive beside Reeve’s tray, and briefly meets my eyes.

“See you in Gongaga,” he says.


End file.
